You might not know this about me, but poker's one of my favorite hobbies. I learned to play a few years ago, and by now I play a fairly good game.

Tomorrow morning, I'll be headed to Las Vegas to play in the 2006 World Series of Poker Championship Event. It's a $10,000 buy-in tournament, but I won my way in online for $160 and got free hotel and some money for travel expenses too, so it's at the very least a free vacation for me. There are too many people in the tournament, so the first day is broken into four pieces: Day 1A, 1B, 1C, and 1D. I play Day 1A, which is on Friday (7/28).

I played in the same event last year and came in 35th out of 5,600+, to take home a prize of $274,090. You might have even seen me on ESPN's coverage of Day 5 of the event. Here's a picture of me from last year:

It was a grueling experience (12-16 hour days for five days... would have been eight had I lasted to the end!), and I got very sick as soon as I exited the tournament and the adrenaline wore off. Because of that, I have pretty mixed feelings about playing this year (I won my way in by accident this year, believe it or not, by entering the wrong tournament by mistake online), but I'm of course happy to have the opportunity to take another shot at winning some money and prestige.

Being the geek that I am, this year I put together a phone service and web application to let all my friends and family track my progress during the tournament. Just go to http://smarx.com/wsop. There you can subscribe to an RSS feed to get my live updates from the table of how many chips I have left and any audio message I leave, or you can just sit on that page and watch the updates come in. (Automatic partial page updates courtesy of Atlas, of course. :-P) That same application will be tracking some other players in the event, mostly Microsoft folks but some friends too.

Good luck everyone!